Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s a common idea in dogmatic religious circles, that “there are no atheists in foxholes”: that the moment an atheist is in serious peril, they’ll call out for divinity. That hasn’t been true to my experiences as an adult: even when robbed at gunpoint, or unfortunately when violently assaulted, I’ve never magically flipped a switch […]
spirituality
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Building a ‘House of Light’: Lessons from Mary Oliver on meaning and spirituality
Reading Time: 2 minutes As I feathered through the pages of Mary Oliver’s House of Light, I noted that I was not the first to do so. My library copy nears the age of 43; an old-fashioned due date table indicates that the first reader visited the poetry collection on August 16, 1990. And people say time machines don’t […]
Posted inSpirituality & Ritual
A region born secular: Nature, spirituality, and secularity in the Pacific Northwest
Reading Time: 7 minutes “I’m Jeremy. I’m 30. I have a little business here. I do, like web development and stuff, and lots of different work. And I’d also be under the kind of irreligious banner.” Born in 1988 and currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Jeremy does not typically mention his irreligious identity when interacting with others in […]
Posted inSociology
Indigenous atheism and the spiritual stereotype
Reading Time: 5 minutes Although nonreligion is now an established area of scholarship in North America and Western Europe, most nonreligion research focuses on white atheists. Little is known about non-white people who self-identify as atheists, leaving research in this area glaringly incomplete. To address this issue, I chose to examine the experiences of Indigenous people in Canada. I […]
Posted inSexuality
How tantra connects sexuality and spirituality
Reading Time: 3 minutes While most Westerners associate tantra with sex, tantric touching provides a way to delve into your erotic side in a way that’s sensual, though not necessarily sexual in nature. Tantra is a centuries-old, highly refined method for self-realization that originated in Northern India. The type of tantra familiar to most Westerners, however, is closer to […]
Posted inLGBTQ
House of Our Queer: Community organizing for the queer spirit
Reading Time: 6 minutes For too long, spiritual wellness and religious communities have been largely run by institutional leaders who center white, cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous people. Because of this, many LGBTQ+ people like me have experienced pain from our religious backgrounds or have felt cut off from a spiritual or faith-based practice. This is a problem because spirituality—rooted in […]
Posted inResearch
A bridge too far: The failure to capture ‘spiritual fitness’ in the US military
Reading Time: 3 minutes After massive resources have been spent trying to assess spiritual fitness in the military, scholars now admit it is not a meaningful concept.
Posted inCulture
Yahoo boys, money rituals, and the magic of desperation
Reading Time: 6 minutes Yahoo boys, babalawos, money rituals. If these terms don’t already mean anything to you, brace yourself—we’re venturing into hard territory. Nigeria is a West African country with two-thirds of the US population packed into less than a tenth of the territory. And there, in recent months, a perennial cycle of violent rituals thought to bring […]
Posted inHealth
Since yoga is so darn old, why not become a poser?
Reading Time: 2 minutes The mind-body connection was discovered many thousands of years ago in India, and yoga emerged as a physical-spiritual practice that purported to join body and brain together with the incorporeal Mind of all existence, variously known as The All, Brahman, and God. In the yogic view, the body is a vehicle and conductor of spiritual […]
Posted inSpirituality & Ritual
How secular rituals can give our lives meaning: An interview with Sasha Sagan
Reading Time: 6 minutes The late astronomer Carl Sagan once wrote in his book Contact, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” It’s only fitting, then, that his daughter Sasha Sagan has carried on his legacy with her own book focusing on secular rituals that provide meaning in our lives. In this exclusive […]